Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips

Canon 100x Superzoom Camera Patent

Canon may step up the 50x optical zoom of the PowerShot SX50 HS with a 100x optical zoom sooner or later. The current SX50 offers an equivalent field of view of 24-1200mm.

However, a recently published patent application from Canon shows that Canon has developed an optical formula that would provide a superzoom camera using the same sensor size with a reach of an equivalent field of view of 20-2000mm on a full frame camera. That works out to a 3.6-340mm actual focal length for the 1/2.3″ sensor size.

(Note that the math doesn’t quite work out in the patent for a true 100x reach; however, the short and long end of zoom lens ranges are rarely ever as wide or long as the numbers on the lens say. All manufacturers fudge those numbers within a certain nominal tolerance. So the roughly 5.6x crop factor makes it about 1900mm at the long end.)